


Stillborn Psychopomp

by PridakArbiter



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy, Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25251136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PridakArbiter/pseuds/PridakArbiter
Summary: Commander Shepard, Citadel Council Spectre, N-7, destroys the Reapers, at great personal cost. Thus, it is with some consternation that she finds herself in a city, Brockton Bay, that does not match any historical record on her omni-tool, and in a time long past, in a world vastly divergent from the one she knew.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 44





	1. Chapter 1

Broken body, unshaken will. Blood down her face, running like unbidden tears.

“Shepard. Commander?”

“Commander Shepard?”

“I don’t see- I’m not sure how too-” She answered, more of a murmur than an actual response. Her vision in one eye was clouded, and she tasted blood in her mouth.

The Crucible wasn’t firing. It was all for naught. All the deaths, all the destruction. The sacrifices. Her friends. Her companions. Her family. All lost along the way. In the end, it seemed it didn’t even matter. Those sacrifices made for a few moments more.

The Reapers were going to win. She wasn’t strong enough, she didn’t know how to fire the crucible.

The podium was right there in front of her. Pain radiated out from her arms, as Commander Shepard, last final hope, a failed hope, tried to drag her shattered and broken body toward the control panel. If she could only reach it…

Maybe, there was something she could do. They were dying, and she was too weak.

“Commander?” The voice of Admiral Hacket was distant as if he was speaking through some far distant tube. A tiny voice, Shepard grunted in pain, bloody hands clawing at the pristine floor. 

Why did it have to be her that failed?

Darkness crept in, insidiously. Shepard was a creature of will, never had it failed her, never had her body refused to fight. Slowly agonizingly, creeping in, darkness flittering, clouding her sight.

For a moment, she was reminded of her death. Floating, gasping for air that was not there. Feeling the long cold grasp of death set in.

This was different, and was all the worse for it. Then she at least had satisfaction in her final moments. Satisfaction that her crew had survived, at least longer than she had. The captain goes down with the ship, after all.

The terror she felt then as the cold darkness of suffocation set in was primal, that was still true but as the shadow of asphyxiation clutched her she had still mustered up a little voice that whispered of the good she had done in life.

This was not like that. This death crept along slick fingers, rotten with desperation. There was no satisfaction, no sense that at least she had saved a life. There was only the unpleasant bitter taste of failure, tainting her life.

Everything had been for naught. She wasn’t strong enough, the life ebbed from her body, as the distant explosions of mass effect drives lit the void of space like so many foreign stars. The world, the galaxy, the universe, all of them burned. She had failed.

She had failed everyone that believed in her. That sour taste was worse than just the bitter miasma of failure. She had failed Earth. She had failed humanity. She failed the galaxy. The Turians, the Asari, the Geth, all of them. 

Light burned her eyes, and for just a moment, Shepard allowed herself to wonder if death had finally swung the scythe, where it had failed before.

She managed to hang on to just the barest fragment of consciousness amidst a sea of painful agony and the slow inevitable encroachment of death.

Awareness slowly returned to her, her pain seemed more distant. Muted almost. It was still there, lingering like a phantom, awaiting its just hour, but for now, she could think again. Slowly, agonizingly, Commander Shepard, failed heroine, lifted her beleaguered head.

A figure stood in front of her, shrouded in white energy. A child. Had she actually died? Shepard’s thoughts were slow, her intellect returning the longer the pain seemed distant. 

Shepard inhaled, tasting blood in her mouth. Her body was broken, a fact she knew. Yet, she was Shepard, it would not be like her to die on her knees. To die defeated. All might be lost but she wasn’t going to die without a fight. The resolution and the determination that fueled her a lifetime ago on Akuze drew on her indomitable will.

One foot hit the ground, the step heavy, sending lances of fire up her leg, all the way to her torso. One done. She rested on one knee for a moment, then she wrenched the other leg under her, struggling to her feet. The room swam around her, and she thought, the idea infinitely distant, that it was a pity that all her medi-gel was gone. Discarded, used for those that died anyway. What she would give for some medi-gel to dull her pain.

Blood dripped at a glacial pace down her arm, dark rivulets leaking from the inside of her suit. Her blood fell, raindrops of crimson on an ocean of grey metal.

“Why are you here?” a child’s voice asked, echoing. Shepard glanced upward, taking in the ghostly, softly shimmering figure before her. She had never been one to believe in spirits or ghosts…

“What?” the word came out in a pain-filled gasp, fairly drenched in agony, “Where am I?”

The child regarded her, its shimmering features implacable, “The Citadel. It’s my home.”

Shepard, in turn, regarded the child, her thoughts sluggish, “Who are you?”

Her tone was almost pleading, not quite. The tone was that of a broken woman. A woman that had given all that she could give and failed on the precipice through no fault of her own. The voice of failure, talking with delusions as the world, all worlds burned in the fires of defeat.

“I am the Catalyst,” the child replied, voice echoing in the still darkness of the Citadel.

Shepard’s mind clenched into high gear so fast that the world swam in front of her once more, her thoughts raced, “I thought the Citadel was the Catalyst?”

Her words were sharper, pointed, a rapier for the genius mind of one of the youngest N-7 in history. For all that the Citadel Council regarded her as a dumb brute, little better than an attack dog, there was a reason that she was chosen by humanity as a Spectre. There was a reason she succeeded where others failed. Her mind was one of her greatest weapons, for all that she had less occasion to use it in the firefights of yesteryear.

“No, the Citadel is part of me,” the child replied. An ugly gnawing truth rose to the surface of Shepard’s mind.

“I need to stop the Reapers. Do you know how I can do that?” she asked, first tendril of dark suspicion crowding into her voice. The child turned its shimmering head toward her.

“The Reapers are mine. I control them. They are my solution.” The child said, and that awful clarity intruded on her thoughts again. Her fears realized. Yet, this was not an enemy she could defeat with brawn, her reserves depleted. She had no weapon great enough to destroy the Citadel. If she had, this fight would’ve ended against the Reapers long ago. Her biotics were there, shimmering, pulsing under her skin, aching to be used, but Shepard refrained.

What was in front of her was a projection. Shepard had little recourse.

“Solution? To what?” Shepard asked, wondering whether she would even understand. The Reapers were eldritch abominations, at least they had seemed that way as they menanced her life for far too long. 

“Chaos.” The child replied, tone matter-of-fact, “You bring it upon yourselves. The created will always rebel against their creators.”

Was that what this was, a re-imaging on a cosmic scale of the Quarian-Geth conflict? How? Shepard struggled to draw the lines of logic closed. The child, the Catalyst spoke again, voice eerie in the silence of the world. Incandescent explosions continued to paint the heavens in bright lights, shining like short-lived suns. Shepard’s mind ran, and her questions, each one wracking her body with pain sprung forth. 

It finally culminated with three fateful words, their taste sour on her lips, tainting the metallic taste of blood, “So now what?”

“You can wipe out all synthetic life if you want,” the Catalyst claimed, tone perfectly level, just as the machine it represented.

“The Geth. Even you, partly synthetic.”

“But the Reapers will be destroyed?” Shepard cursed the needy pained tone of her voice, the raw desperation, the naked hope. It was a fool's hope, one that she barely believed to be real.

“Yes,” the Catalyst replied, qualifying its words, “But the peace won’t last. Soon your children would create synthetics, and then the chaos will come back.”

“Maybe,” Shepard replied.

“Or do you think you would control us instead?” The Catalyst asked.

“So the Illusive Man was right after all,” Shepard murmured, the words more for herself.

Still, the Catalyst answered, “Yes, but he never could have taken control… because we already controlled him.”

“But I can?” She asked, tone pensive.  
“But you will lose everything…” The mass relays, her life, her body, everything.  
The choices before her loomed. Death to all synthetics, the reapers included. Control them, turning them away from the world, from the galaxy. Or join with synthetics. Symbiosis.

“No,” She replied. She stood before the way, the Catalyst by her side.

“No? The paths are open, you must choose,” The Catalyst said.

Shepard chose.

Red filled her vision, destruction.

All she could think of was that she had won, triumphed. When all hope was lost. When the universe teetered on the verge of utter annihilation. She wasn’t a failure. She hadn’t disappointed Anderson. She hadn’t disappointed Garrus. She hadn’t disappointed Liara.

She had succeeded, and Commander Shepard took some scant solace from that fact as her breath left her, and oblivion crept in on its wings.

It was some surprise then when Commander Shepard found she was still alive. The acrid scent of burning garbage promoted her to open a tired cerulean blue eye to stare at a rusted dumpster.

The distant sound of police sirens, straight out of a retro twentieth-century vid slowly pulled her more aware. Her body ached, each breath, raspy and agony. Commander Shepard, Citadel Council Spectre, took a ragged breath through her nose, ignoring the scent of her own blood.

The air reeked of garbage, refuse and animal excrement, and an underlying smell of the sea. Her ceramic armor was shattered and fused to her chest by the heat of her last assault on the Citadel. She could smell cooked flesh under it, a distinctly unique scent that she had smelled far too often. Her arm wept blood where a grazing claw had pierced armor and flesh alike.

Her thoughts were hazy, viewing reality through a film. Still, Shepard was an alliance marine, through and through, and she didn’t quit. Another rasped breath in, setting her lungs alight as if she had stuffed them with razor wire.

An exhale, tinged with blood. She risked another breath, razor wire down her throat, and then pulled her arm under her. It didn’t bend right, but it was just a small pain compared to what she was in.

Her cheek was wet where she lay and as she rasped out another breath she slowly pushed herself off the ground and against the back wall. Dirty water covered the majority of the alleyway. A yellow street light flickered. All Shepard could ask was if she was back on Earth, in the quiet recess of her own mind. Her eye, the good one, not the one swollen shut by blunt trauma tracked heavenward.

Stars and constellations gleamed down from overhead, and Shepard had her answer. Even a wayward cosmic soldier knew the constellations and sky from her home planet. Shepard was on Earth.

An impossible Earth. Every inch of the world had been scoured by the Reapers, immolated by their beams. Shepard could still hear the sirens wailing, an antiquated sound that they were, and there was no way that they would still shriek if the Reapers had destroyed everything.

Shepard grit her teeth, actually feeling a tooth crack and heaved herself to her feet, half-cybernetic fingers digging into the mortar of the alleyway’s brick wall. Her fingers came away slick with even more blood, the protective skin peeled away.

Her omni-tool lit orange, glowing faintly in the early morning light. It flickered once, and for one heart-stopping moment, Shepard thought it would sputter and die. It flickered again and then the interface stabilized. With fingers slick with her own life-blood Shepard flicked through military channels.

Her mood turned dark, despair clawing at her thoughts as her half-crazed mind suddenly realized what she was seeing. The military channels were empty. There was nothing. No chatter, no orders. Nothing. Nobody was talking.

Shepard lifted a hand to rub at her face, at her bloody nose and the blood crusted on her face. The faintest stirring of panic threatened to overwhelm her and she paused, taking a moment to reorder her thoughts. She needed to focus. If the military channels were down, then maybe the civilian ones?

It was a long shot. If something had taken out all military channels then there was little chance anything civilian was left. After all, civilian communication hardware wasn’t even adequately hardened.

Leaning against the brick, Shepard keyed in the parameter change into her omni-tool. She blinked. The channels were there. Why were there so many civilian channels? Radio? Amplitude Modulation Radio? Frequency Modulation Radio? That was from the 21st century, wasn’t it? 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz signals blasting information around with abandon. No cybersecurity whatsoever.

Commander Shepard sighed, the slight motion and exhalation enough to make her attempt to curl inward to stop the sudden pain, but that just brought new pain.

Slowly, shakily, she shuffled forward, paying no heed to the way her matted red hair clung to her face in wet locks. Her eyes shifted to the right and the left. A car, an actual honest-to-God car, with wheels and everything rested half-destroyed just outside the alleyway. Shepard turned, seeing paper flutter down the street, not yet waterlogged. The street was half-flooded, destroyed cars and trucks pushed into buildings, and bent around the street lights. 

Where was she?


	2. A Fading Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shepard comes to some revelations

Her armored feet parted the silty water, and Commander Shepard trudged slowly into the open. Her Cerberus augments meant that even with the dim wavering streetlights, and pale sidereal luminescence she could see clearly.

Drawn almost by the whim of fate, her gaze tracked upward, towards Earth’s lonely satellite.

“Well-” she said, almost by habit as she stared at the moon. The pain that stabbed into her throat and the blood that dribbled from her mouth prevented her from forming the words that she intended to utter. 

Instead, she was left to just her thoughts. An empty moon. Even from Earth, the domed cities of Luna should still be clear, and the scars of mining also present. Shepard’s lips twitched into a grimace as yet again she was forced to consider what all of this meant.

Luna was empty, barren.

There was no military comms. No channels filled with frantic marines and Citadel races clamoring for reinforcement. Even with the death of the Reapers and hopefully subsequent destruction of all the abominations that they called foot soldiers, there should still be communication.

She didn’t quite know what to think. Nothing was adding up. A sodden paper lay at her feet, half floating in the water. Barely legible words were printed over its cover page, ‘Bombs’ were printed across the front in large bold letters. Shepard squinted, she had seen enough period dramas to recognize a newspaper. They were an archaic relic, the last time she had seen one in person was… actually never that she could recall.

Her eyes roved upward, over the ruins, and smashed antiquated cars. Cars that ran on fossil fuels she noted, eyeing the black sludge that leaked away from one such car. Had she… Had she traveled back in time?

Shepard grit her teeth and lifted her arm toward her omni-tool, ignoring the sharp pain that shot down her arm, even though it made her eyes smart. Her omni-tool activated, orange light almost searingly bright in the surrounding darkness. Shepard glanced down, her fingers slowly moving between applications. 

She hit the wrong one with a blood-soaked finger and had to backtrack a moment later, as the hard light screen folded into a popup. She wanted a map application. There weren’t many she had to choose from, usually, the Normandy just sent any schematics to her omni-tool and the passive scanners in her hardsuit worked well enough to map her immediate surroundings. The little uplink symbol on her omni-tool had a small red line through it. No connection. For some reason, that fact hit harder than any other. Shepard wanted to heave, her stomach rolled even through all the other pain she was experiencing.

Her whole existence was just pain. Pain and more pain. She sat back into a car, glowing omni-tool still around her wrist. Suddenly, she just couldn’t be bothered to turn it off. One hand, the injured one came up again to wipe at her face, smearing more blood over both her hand and face.

She opened the map app on her second try, her hand finally cooperating, fighting through the painful spasms. It opened seamlessly, booting, then the no-signal symbol cropped up, flashing like an ominous herald.

Shepard grit her teeth, hissing in pain as she forced her broken arm to move, fingers flicking over to the application settings. Her device was picking up all those civilian channels, there was no way it had no connection at all.

Yet the results soon greeted her, ‘incompatible connection’. Shepard just stared at the words for an instant, eyes not comprehending before she twitched a little, instantly regretting it. What did it mean, incompatible connection? A little more savagely than she intended she attempted to hit the little interface button which was more fabrication than real. The display changed, now it said, ‘insufficient bandwidth,’ and ‘incompatible hardwire.’ A service request popped up after those two, flashing orange. Shepard scowled, the motion pulling a wound under her eye and shut the app.

She sat in the dark, only illuminated by the light of her omni-tool. Intellectually, she knew she was setting herself up as a target. How many times had she taken a shot in the dark, where the target was only lit by the dim light of his or her omni-tool? She was out in the open, armor barely salvageable, with a close to busted omni-tool.

She was also close to critical condition. It was a real marvel that she was even alive. Almost as an afterthought, she keyed on the barebones medical diagnostic app she installed ages ago. Lifetimes ago. Well, at least one death ago.

‘Stabilized’ greeted her in flashing yellow letters. Morbidly amusing, in a way, since there was no healthy green anywhere on her body. Shepard wasn’t even surprised, not really. She had walked through hell and back and then gone in again for seconds. What did surprise her was the stabilization. That didn’t seem possible. She raised an arm, soaked in blood, and examined it, noting the red lines glowing faintly through her skin. At least Cerberus had been good for something, even if they kind of doomed humanity on their way out.

Her vision chose that moment to swim again, the thin metal of the car’s rear was crumpling inward under the weight of her armored form, even under the weight of ruined armor. There was a flicker-hiss, barely audible that her long experience allowed her to recognize.

God, her barriers were back. She could feel the soothing protective mass effect field around her body, clinging just tight enough to not excite her own biotics. Already, her neurons were firing, biotic energy pulsing under her skin. The simple quasi-Pavlovian conditioning of usually being knee-deep in combat when that distinctive sound reached her ears enough to send her adrenaline pumping.

The medical app beeped, two parts of it shifting toward the red. Shepard forcefully exhaled, yet again ignoring the wetness at the corners of her mouth. Her own blood. There had to be internal damage, even if the medial app seemed sure that she could walk it off. That being said she had never quite walked off something this bad before. Her body was a broken shell, clad in a shattered husk of a hardsuit.

She had to face reality. There was something decidedly odd about where she found herself. Either she had somehow managed to catapult herself back in time, a feat that Tali and literally everyone had repeatedly claimed was impossible, or something else had happened, far worse.

She recalled her words to the Reaper, to the Catalyst. She intended to destroy them, she had told it so. It was artificial intelligence, a hopeless cold intelligence. It could’ve lied? Why had she taken its words as truth? Just because it was a machine that did not mean that it couldn’t lie.

What were the words that Sovereign rumbled so long ago, “Rudimentary creatures of flesh and blood-”

Sovereign’s very existence hinted at some purpose unfathomable. Now that she had a moment to think seriously, for some reason she was feeling doubtful that the Catalyst had been honest. Why would it be? Shepard stared up again, toward the light of Luna and let the gathered tears beading at the corner of her eyes fall as twin laments. The distant ridges walked once by many brave explorers, now a barren landscape.

There was a worse alternative that even she hoped was beyond the Reaper’s power. She wanted to destroy the Reapers. She had thought they were just machines, elevated beyond all earthly majesty. She had considered them simple, for all their eldritch power. Binary. Controllable. What if their powers extended beyond the nature of reality.

Had her actions unmade a world? Made a universe where the Reapers never existed? Without the Reapers there would be no Prothean ruins on Mars. No ruins meant that element zero might not be found or understood for hundreds of years. It was those first forays into alien physics that propelled humanity past the limits of their solar system, out toward Charon. Without the Reapers, there would be no mass relays.

Philosophers and economists had talked about the twentieth century and twenty-first centuries as real primed explosives, liable to go off at the slightest nudge. The discovery of life outside Earth had arrested that as expansion followed, freeing Earth of its excess.

Shepard looked around at the shattered street, and moaned, more in despair than any pain, though that followed on swift wings. Had she saved a universe only to doom another one to be unrecognizable? It was a heady thought, and she grimaced, already realizing that it was worth it, whatever the price.

She had sacrificed everything. Crew, friends, and family. Given everything until she had nothing more to give, than she gave some more. Her body sat here aching and shattered, destitute, and alone amidst the ruins. Shepard’s pained grimace curled slowly into a self-deprecating smile, these were despairing thoughts, almost maudlin, and she despised them.

There was a flicker of green and white, atop a rooftop across the shattered and flooded street. Shepard froze, every marine instinct she held screaming at her to get to cover, to dive behind the car and draw her sidearm. Activate her biotics, cover herself in a barrier. Anything, really.

Her eyes met a green visor, staring in her direction. Even from this distance, she could see the lower face of a child on the figure. The girl, if the green skirt was anything to go by, seemed to pause, one hand raised toward her head to touch her temple. For a pregnant moment, both Shepard and the girl regarded each other.

Shepard sighed, letting the orange glow around her wrist fade, leaving her solely shrouded in the anemic light of the softly flickering street light. A child wasn’t a threat to her. She had killed tens of hundreds, tens of thousands, maybe, in combat. All she felt was a bone-deep weariness.

Space bent, and this time she did react, rolling backward, slamming her back and arm into the water with a loud splash. She let out a sharp aborted yelp of pain as the saltwater slipped through the gaps in her armor to reach the burned flesh underneath.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry,” the green and white costumed girl said, counting exceedingly contrite, “I didn’t mean to startle you! You just looked like you were in an awful amount of pain!”

“I am,” Shepard hissed, tone acidic, her back stinging. She clutched her arm to her chest, the pain from it even worse now.

“The truce is still ongoing,” the girl fairly whispered, clearly taken aback, “Did you fight - did you fight Leviathan?”

Her tone was apologetic, for all that she watched Shepard quite intently, mouth set in a grim line. Her uniform was all sleek lines, done in green and white, and all Shepard could think was that it was quite impractical. Combat grey was the way to go, all the way.

Shepard stilled, thinking quickly, what is she talking about? A teeny voice crackled from the girl’s head, from a comm in her helmet. 

“Vista, where are you? You dropped off the patrol route.”

“Do you need assistance,” The girl, perhaps Vista asked, ignoring the voice.

“What day is it?” Shepard asked, suddenly desperate, voice tinged over with anxiety. She kept it under wraps but just enough crept free to taint her words. Vista reared back.

“May 16th?” She responds, the space between the two of them stretching slowly outward, Vista receding away. Shepard closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply in, ignoring the pain in her chest and throat and the ugly rattle.

“What year?” she demanded.

“Um,” Vista fidgeted for a moment, “2011?”


	3. Probing Minds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shepard enters the hospital and encounters Panacea

Chapter 3: Probing Minds

“Lieutenant Shepard,” Commander William Nash said, face shrouded in shadow. His fingers tapped against the alloy-steel desk.

“Lieutenant Shepard reporting as ordered!” she belted out, raising her voice.

A datapad hit the table with a dull thump. Shepard risked a quick glance down. Her heart leaped to her throat in the next instant. Even reading it upside down she recognized her file.

“Exemplary scores in every portion of NCO academy, more than enough endorsements to jump right to commissioned officer school,” Commander Nash observed.

Shepard stayed quiet, praying that they hadn’t found it. It had been half a year. There was no way they had found it after all this time, was there?

“You don’t seem to play well with others. Three counts of insubordination-”

“-Sir!” She interjected desperately.

“-justified, but still in your file,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard her.

“Then was what happened at your graduation. The scenario was designed as a team effort, you completed it alone.”

“I couldn’t-” Shepard tried to speak again. It wasn’t proper protocol at all, she was supposed to wait for permission, but the injustice boiled away at her insides.

“Those are exactly the traits we’re looking for, welcome to N-7 school,” Commander Nash said, leaning forward out of the shadows. For all that his tone was humorous, his expression was dark, almost angry.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A chill breeze swept down the alleyway, valiantly tugging on the wet papers stuck to the ground.  
Commander Shepard just stared at the green-clothed child in incomprehension.

The idea of time travel itself was almost unbelievable.

“No.” Shepard replied, voice distant, “It’s not possible.”

“Not possible?” Vista asked, tone hesitant. She bit at her lower lip nervously, the only part of her exposed beneath her green visor. The space between the two of them seemed to waver, increasing and decreasing as the small girl breathed in and out.

Shepard snarled and lashed out, her side flaring in pain. Her omni-blade burned into existence and carved into the antique car next to her with nary any effort. The almost mono-molecular super-heated blade carved through metal and glass with ease. The orange light died out, flickering out of sight, its task complete.

She bit out a strangled sounding sigh, one bloody hand coming up to her head again, smearing more blood over her face. Her knees hit the ground a moment later. She felt like she was back on Akuze, the worms twisting beneath the surface, disturbing the sand.

She was back on the citadel, black despair clawing at her insides. Time travel…

She opened her eyes, green eyes staring out at a dark city. She was Commander Shepard. She couldn’t waffle about, lamenting what had apparently happened. She had to confront the reality of her situation. She was in the past. A past where the Reapers would be bearing down on reality within two centuries at the most.

“Are you okay?” Vista asked, green booted feet splashing in the water at quite a distance away. The air twisted into a funnel around her, distorting but still carrying sound. Shepard's sharp eyes cataloged the effect. She was relatively sure that biotics hadn’t even been a known phenomenon in 2011.

“No,” she replied, even if the inner marine within her growled at her to say yes. To never show weakness, never back down.

The short pre-teen girl bent space around her again, moving closer without moving. Shepard felt a tingle over her body, running down her spine from her biotic implant.

“Can I help?” she asked, reaching out a hand hesitantly toward Shepard. She paused, hesitant to touch her bloody body.

Shepard bit back her instinctive request for medi-gel. She wasn’t even sure when medi-gel had been invented, certainly not until after the First Contact War.

She needed a plan. If she was in the past, and by all indication she was, then she needed to do something to prepare for the reapers. To do that she needed a functioning body.

Then there was the question of Leviathan, what was a leviathan? She kind of doubted that she was speaking about the fabled Leviathan of Dis. That was more a deep space legend than actual reality. Of course, that had actually been proven to be true and was actually a Reaper in disguise, just like everything seemed to be.

“No,” Commander Shepard replied, then re-thought, “Yes, maybe.”

She released a pained grunt, her omni-tool flashing with the medical hologram again. Since the application hadn’t been properly closed it continued to flash. All yellow, with a spattering of orange throughout her torso. Thankfully, no red, but Shepard knew from experience how easy it was for that orange to shift into red.

Vista still seemed hesitant, but seemed to steel herself, muttering just under her breath, “I can do this.”

Vista reached a hand up to the side of her green and white helmet. Shepard’s sharp ears could hear the crackle of a primitive radio, like the ones used on out of the way colony worlds. Vista spoke, raising her voice slightly, “I found another survivor, Dash Red, I’m bringing her to the hospital.”

A hospital? Shepard supposed she could live with that.

Space bent around her again and Shepard suppressed a flinch, her fist clenched partway toward the activation sequence for her omni-blade. It was the last weapon she had. Everything else had been lost along the way. Left when it ran out of ammo, the little blocks inside depleted entirely by the sheer amount of living corpses she needed to wade through.

The little girl clad in green and white stood beside her a moment later. Shepard’s eyes adjusted, filtering the visual spectrum until she could see through the green visor at the blue eyes underneath. The Cerberus mods were extensive and about the only good thing that came out of dying in space. That was questionable as well since Shepard also knew without a doubt that whatever advancements went into her body had probably been tested extensively on living subjects.

A line of fire ran up her spine, the world twisting around her. Starbursts filled her vision and she could taste blue for a moment. She stumbled once, armored foot tearing into the tarmac.

“I’m sorry,” Vista said, sounding worried. Her white gloves were stained with red. Shepard supposed she must’ve tried to grab her arm and stop her from falling.

Shepard could taste blood on her tongue, yet again. She spat, the red hitting oily black and sinking into the puddle by her feet.

“Your space-warping,” Shepard murmured, “I’m not sure it agrees with me.”

“The hospital isn’t far,” Vista replied, sounding determined. She angled closer, shoving herself under Shepard’s shoulder, helping her stand upright. She grunted under Shepard’s weight.

“Is this power armor?” she asked curiously, her tone carefully probing. Shepard could feel her deft fingers, still clad in stained white gloves carefully holding her arm.

Shepard debated for a second on whether she should answer, was power armor a thing they had in 2011? A moment later she realized that whatever she answered it was obvious Vista already knew enough about power armor to guess.

“Yes,” she finally replied, neglecting to clarify the make and model.

The pace was agonizing. For all Vista’s enthusiasm, Shepard’s armor was way too heavy for the girl to actually assist her. Still, her determination brought warmth to a heart atrophied by loss. Commander Shepard had seen almost every friend laid to rest before the end. Even poor Liara. She had failed them all, and in the end it seemed she might very well fail them again.

“Hey,” Vista called out, “Over here! She needs help!”

Two armored forms rushed forward, black armor over antiquated black combat fatigues. Little white letters were emblazoned on their chests, spelling out ‘PRT ENE.’ Both had an antique chemical propellant weapon slung over their shoulders. They paused a moment, seeming to hesitate before reaching out and grabbing Shepard’s arms, taking her out from over Vista.

“I need to go,” Vista said, turning toward Shepard, she almost seemed to be trying to appear older, more serious, “You’ll be fine, just get healing and then you can leave.”

Shepard graced her with a sharp nod, feeling the blood bead down from her red hair in a new rivulet. She could get help then get out of there, it would be surprising if they could actually treat her. She was filled with enough augmentation to bankrupt a small colony world for decades.

In time, any ailment she had would treat itself, provided she had enough time.

The black-garbed soldiers carefully, almost gently, guided her into the building.

A bored looking woman in a rumpled grey suit stopped them with an outstretched hand. She had messy brown hair atop a pale face with deep bags under her eyes. The soldiers ground to a stop immediately upon seeing her.

“Hero or Villain?” she asked, holding aloft a datapad. Shepard did a double-take as she saw what looked like an actual ink pen in her hand, green eyes flickering back toward the pad, which wasn’t actually a pad at all, but looked more like a wood pulp particle board with a weird metal hinge. Shepard didn’t know of anything like it. Was this a common thing in the past?

“Hero?” She said, even if it only fit at the most basic level. She really didn’t feel like a hero, not really. Destroyed relays, sacrificed worlds, left friends, and family to die. No, she wasn’t a real hero, not really. Hero of the Citadel, she had been lauded as such once. It left a bad taste in her mouth. A sickly sweet, almost rotten taste.

She tried her best. Her life was just a repeat of her worst moments.

“Name?” the woman asked, looking bored once again. She had shown just the barest amount of interest when Shepard was pulled in, but now she had descended back toward apathy.

“Co-” Commander Shepard cut herself off. She had no rank, not really, “Shepard.”

“Shepherd, got it,” the woman replied, and by the inflection, Shepard could tell she got it wrong almost immediately. She handed out a blue bracelet, plucking it free from a little satchel she had by her side.

“Bring her to wing B, Panacea should just be making her final round of the night, she might be able to catch her,” the woman commanded, turning away. Shepard noted the mud splattered up the pant legs of her accurate antique, but not any longer, suit as she marched away, head high.

Her feet clumped into the ground under the armored weight with each step. One of the soldiers assisting her grunted, evidently not that appreciative of the weight.

“B-wing,” the other announced a few moments later, guiding her toward a bench that sat empty. There was a red stain on top of its plain plastic surface but neither of the two black-clad soldiers seemed to pay it any heed.

Shepard sunk down onto it with a muffled groan. Her sides ached. Her back ached. Her neck and implant. Everything really. She buried her face in her hands, letting herself escape back into her thoughts for a moment. Relive her glory days. The days where defeating the Reapers seemed like an inevitability, before that last mission to the Omega 4 relay. That was where everything began to fall apart.

There was the sound of soft footfalls and Shepard looked up. A girl walked down the hallway, features half twisted up into an annoyed scowl. She was clad in what looked like an old-time nurse costume crossed with medieval knight tunic. A large red cross decorated the front of her white cloak. Strands of brown hair escaped from a large white hood, drawn close around her freckled face. Sharp, almost acidic seeming brown eyes burned into Shepard’s own green.

A complicated emotion flickered behind the face of the nurse-looking girl as she strolled to a stop in front of Shepard. Her eyes drifted down to the blue bracelet on her arm and then the scowl lifted somewhat.

“If I need to treat another villain...” the brown-haired girl murmured, stepping closer. She reached out a hand, almost looking like she was acting by rote and stated, “Do I have permission to heal you?”

Shepard just stared at her for a moment. She had no equipment. No omni-tool or whatever the equivalent for this period was supposed to be. She was just a teenage girl in a costume. The whole situation seemed surreal, and belatedly Shepard wondered whether her brain had been somehow scrambled. It would actually be great if that beacon back on Eden Prime had just decided to scramble her brain and the last few years were just a fevered coma dream. Spectre Nihlus’ death was just a complete accident or something like that.

“Sure,” Shepard replied, at a loss for what else to say.

The girl stretched forward her hand, grabbing the hand Shepard had started to raise to bat aside the hand headed for her face. The girl twitched bodily, eyes bugging out in her head.

“What the fuck?” she said, and Shepard’s alarm immediately rose at the sheer dismay that she heard in the girl’s voice.

“What?” she asked hoarsely, voice cracking toward the end. Not from fear, but just from exhaustion.

“This skin isn’t even real skin,” the girl replied, “a property of Cerberus?”

Instantly, Shepard was out of her seat, muscles screaming in agony as she attempted to put distance between her and the girl.

The omni-blade ignited around her hand, warming it despite the perfectly engineered distance.

“Who are you? How are you doing that?” she demanded, tone flat and dangerous.

The girl just stood where she had broke contact, not seeming to notice the broken contact, “-and cancerous nodes down your spine-”

She seemed to blink, looking back toward where Shepard now stood, her bloody back against the wall. The orange omni-tool blade between the two of them.

She blinked again, a chastised look gracing her face, “I’m Panacea.”

Panacea didn’t explain anything at all. What even was a Panacea? Some kind of doctor? A proper name?

“What were you doing?” Commander Shepard demanded, again her voice incensed, well aware of the blinking red and orange health display under the surface of the omni-blade interface.

“I’m Panacea,” the girl explained, her voice growing irritated, “I heal.”

“You heal?” Shepard asked incredulously. What even was this? There were no biotic powers that gave healing. It was impossible.

“Isn’t that what I just said?” the girl responded rhetorically.


	4. Heroism Burns

“Run us through what happened, again,” the judge advocate said, steepling his fingers. His crisp dress blues creased as he leaned forward. She was back in one of these rooms again, light shining into her face.

A hostile environment. An enemy environment. She could still feel the blood under the fingers of her hardsuit, ally, and enemy alike.

Shepard could feel the snear threatening to burst free, the caustic temper that got her into the whole mess, in the first place.

The advocate sighed, leaning back, his dark eyes taking in Shepard’s shaking body.

“Look, can I call you Jane?”

“No,” Shepard bit out, vitriol lacing her voice.

He grimaced, “Look, Shepard, the Batarians are calling it a war crime-”

“They started it!” Shepard’s eyes flashed, green eyes boring into the advocate’s eyes with the force of a kinetic laser. The words were reminiscent of a juvenile argument, a schoolyard statement. It galled Shepard but her fury was boiling, it was always boiling since she saw the surface of Torfan. What the Batarians did there was beyond horrifying.

“I’m not saying they didn’t, but we need to investigate this properly or the Citadel is going to be breathing down our backs,” he replied, leaning back, trying to be conciliatory. It might even have worked if it wasn’t for that damnable light shining in her face.

Shepard was quiet, her face a snarl, literally biting her tongue to keep from speaking something she would regret. Her mother always said that her temper would be her death, but all it would buy her here was a court-martial.

“Let’s start from the beginning when you landed on Torfan…”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Let’s start from the beginning,” the girl in white and red said, sighing slightly, repeating her introduction, “I’m Panacea and I heal.”

Shepard grit her teeth, just slightly, just enough to ground her, pull her from the memory that swirled around her thoughts. Threatening to pull her in. She knew she had problems, her files were full of them.

The drugs usually kept them away, but there hadn’t been time to stock up before the final run. She hadn’t dared take them from those that needed them more. She could stand to live with her ghosts and mistakes. She could.

The brown-haired girl inclined her head just slightly, trying to prompt Shepard to respond in kind. Shepard was struck again on just how tired she looked, for all the faux exuberance she seemed to exude, she was really just going through the motions.

“I’m Shepard,” She paused, for just a moment too long. Here she would normally add something like, ‘I’m with the Systems Alliance’ or even ‘Council Spectre.’ The introduction felt stilted, incomplete. Even ‘Commander’ would be better than just Shepard.

And didn’t that send a rod of regret down her back. ‘Shepard Commander.’ What had she repaid the Geth with? Death? Genocide? If she even succeeded, if the Crucible hadn’t lied, she had betrayed the allies that had assisted her all along the way. The Geth and even EDI had stuck with her until the end until even they couldn’t follow.

Then it was just Shepard to tread the final path. A final path that ended in betrayal for the good of the many. It stung, a bitter slash right to her heart. A choice she never could’ve dreamed of making until she stood before the Crucible and made the best choice she could.

“Can I heal you?” Panacea’s words were slow and deliberate.

Shepard eased away from her spot, the orange omni-blade dissipated by this point. It was flash-forged, made for just a moment of combat. If the blade was not whetted, the program automatically reclaimed the excess. An optimized application, like most military apps.

Optimized, as she had been. What had the Illusive Man said once? ‘I made you Shepard!’ He had said he didn’t want to change her fundamentally, but he had sure slipped in an awful lot of little modifications, and some really big ones too.

The idea that Cerberus had clawed around inside her, rebuilding necrotized tissue. Bringing her back from the land of the dead, it never sat well with her, not really. However, her duty to humanity was too vast to let something petty stand in the way.

“Well?” Panacea said, seeming half-poised to just walk away.

“You can heal me,” Shepard finally replied, a sharp green eye staring into Panacea’s eyes, looking for any slight trace of subterfuge. She still didn’t know what ‘heal’ even meant, except it somehow allowed this, this girl, to look at her body and see the stamps that Cerberus branded her with.

Marked their ownership like she was corporate property. As if she was an animal.

Panacea extended a hand, pale fingers without nail polish moving forward to rest against Shepard’s blood-soaked arm.

Panacea frowned a moment, looking at something, before she spoke again, “You got all this fighting Leviathan?”

She didn’t seem to be expecting a response, so Shepard didn’t give her one. She just remained silent. Stoic, watching, feeling. The Reapers were leviathans in a certain manner of speaking, she supposed, drawing her lips into a line.

Shepard glanced down toward the omni-tool, seeing the orange on the screen blip into yellow. A reassuring sight, if one she didn’t really expect at all. She could feel her heart hump in her chest, adrenaline dumping into her system. Before she could even get the pre-fight jitters it smoothed out, dissipating unnaturally quickly.

“How are you doing that?” She finally said, entranced, feeling her breath come easier even as she spoke.

“You had a lot of muscle mass,” Panacea explained, seeming distracted, “it’s easy for me to repurpose what you have... And done.”

Panacea stepped back, her face sliding back from the barely-there expression to something more serious. Her lips pursed as if she was considering something, rolling it over.

Shepard breathed out, taking just a moment to just luxuriate in a pain-free existence. The pain in her legs was gone. The burns along her side and neck no longer pulled like fish-hooks in her side when she struggled to move. A thousand aches and lacerations no longer bled.

Shepard blinked, noting that her left eye was clear. The HUD spun up, feeding her information about her surroundings for the first time in days. With an effort of gargantuan will, she blinked it away, forcing herself to focus on the here and now.

“What did you do?” Shepard breathed in, feeling the cold air in her lungs.

“Did you know that your body was necrotizing?” Panacea asked, seeming almost half-curious. She looked like she was back to being bored and tired, barely dialing in.

“Necrotizing?” Shepard answered, voice suspicious, thoughts whirling about. What did that mean? Was it a reference to her resurrection? Or… was she… turning into a husk.

Just like that, a shard of ice-cold feeling ran down her back. The self-same feeling that suffused her body on that fatal day so long ago, when her air pipe had been punctured.

“Did someone graft you together with a cadaver?” Panacea asked, eyes growing more intent as something seemed to occur to her.

“No?” Shepard responded, still on the back foot. This was about her resurrection then? How the heck was she able to see that? It shouldn’t even have been visible. Chakwas hadn’t ever mentioned anything was wrong. Then again, maybe that was Cerberus’ hand in everything. Reaching where they shouldn’t. Reaching where they ought not.

“Don’t worry,” the assurance sounded almost rote, Panacea’s brown eyes sharply glancing at her over, considering something unknown, “I cleaned out the dead tissue, breaking it down for you. Smoothed out the burn tissue-”

Panacea cut herself off again, something stealing her tongue. Her brown eyes were still considering.

“Those weren’t from the Leviathan fight, were they?” she narrowed her eyes, taking in Shepard’s body, “I’m not supposed to speak to the patients after an Endbringer fight, but you weren’t exactly fighting an Endbringer were you?”

Shepard growled, feeling the way the hardsuit moved around her, the way her skin caught on the sharp edges now that it could feel pain again.

“No,” she admitted, eyes still watching Panacea warily. Panacea chewed on her inner lip, which could be almost called a cute gesture if it wasn’t paired with a calculating face. Sharp eyes looking over her body. Taking stock of Shepard’s appearance, and no doubt the wounds.

Panacea frowned, the edges of her mouth creasing down. Her brown eyes narrowed, something like suspicion gracing them. It didn’t quite graduate into actual suspicion so Shepard considered herself lucky. At least as lucky as she could get concerning the circumstances.

“How exactly…” Shepard started but trailed off, her taking her own moment to look over Panacea again. It still confused her immensely. Even for her, where the impossible became regularly the reality, healing without an omni-tool. Healing by touch just didn’t seem possible.

“How exactly did you heal me?” she settled on asking.

Panacea glanced down at her leg, turning the face of a small data-slate upward enough that she could see the screen and then relaxed slightly, “You’re a hero, right? My power, it’s healing.”

That actually explained precisely nothing. Shepard bit back her expression of utter confusion because, no, that did not make sense at all. Power? Biotics didn’t have that much variance and she had no idea what she was talking about.

Humans didn’t even know about biotics before they discovered the Mars ruins. It wasn’t possible.

“Panacea?” A modulated voice echoed down the hallway, two of the military troopers slipping down the hallway behind her. The white letters ‘PRT’ still emblazoned on their black chest armor. Shepard took in the sight of them with a calculating gaze, watching the way they walked, the way their weight shifted, joints flexed.

The head-up-display in her eyes logged the distance from her to them, leaving a little indicator in her vision when they entered the optimal range for combat. The indicator for a combatant without a kinetic barrier flared in her upper vision, throwing Shepard for a loop for a moment.

No barriers? Her thoughts pin-balled for a moment as she fought through the oddity before she realized where she was. When she was. With an effort of will, Commander Shepard pushed her instincts down, relaxing her coiled muscles. With a creak her fingers came out of the metal bench she rested against.

One of the faceless soldiers, inclined his or her head, seemingly examining her for a long instant. Shepard stared toward where the soldier’s eyes would be on the other side of the one-sided visor. Such mirror helmets were unfortunately a common intimidation tactic. That they protected the identity of the soldier was a lie.

In combat, Commander Shepard knew from experience that you’d barely catch a glimpse of someone else’s face, especially at firefight ranges. Now, a face gave a real advantage, less so in a world of aliens but it was still there. A face, intelligent and staring, could still give people pause when they went to deliver the final blow.

If you wanted faceless soldiers, made for intimidation then you opted for full-face helmets. Or if they were intended to conduct Extra-vehicular activity in the dead of space. Full face helmets were invaluable and necessary to protect against cosmic radiation.

It was a little thing and didn’t really matter in the long run.

Panacea hummed, then gestured with her hand, almost dismissive, but not quite, “A couple more moments, please.”

“Of course, Panacea,” the shorter of the two black-clad PRT soldiers replied, making a subtle hand gesture. A gesture that was so slight that Shepard would have missed it if she wasn’t so accustomed to searching for hidden weapons. Watching hands and gestures was second nature when dealing with people that only needed gestures to kill you.

Shepard was one of those people. Her spine and central nervous system was entirely entwined with nodes of element zero-

“Cancerous nodes?” Shepard asked Panacea, ignoring the retreating black-clad PRT soldiers.

Panacea’s eyes flashed as she turned her attention back to Shepard, “You didn’t know? I assumed it was part of your corona?”

Corona? Corona what? The beverage company? The mercenary company? The respiratory virus? A biotic corona? Shepard just blinked for a moment, parsing the question. It was so out of left field that it sailed all the way around and passed into the left field again. Shepard, made a harried mental note to look it up later.

Later when she had time. When she could sit back and see exactly where she was dropped. When had she ever had time, though? The last time she had alone time which wasn’t sleep was at least a week ago, maybe more.

Some part of her screamed that it was wrong to feel so refreshed. Feel so perfect when so much blood was on her hands. Both of her allies that trusted her and those innocents she had failed or condemned in the name of the greater good.

“You didn’t heal it?” Shepard felt a chill down her back at the thought. Cure her biotics? She felt sick just at the thought. Shepard, human super-soldier, wobbly on her feet because of the words of a teenage girl.

“No, the nodes don’t appear malicious and the way they were formed,” Panacea actually seemed interested, almost impressed, “they’re fascinating. Nerve ganglions, but more advanced than I’ve seen before.”

She played with her fingers, rubbing them together as if she was imagining molding something, “You should really get someone to take a look at the way they link up to your cybernetics, a lot of the tissue was inflamed around them. I don’t have much experience with healing and tinker-tech cybernetics… you’re an independent hero, right?”

Her fixation of asking whether she was a hero was actually alarming. Shepard’s expression sharpened, but she answered anyway, voice low and tone somber, “I like to think I’m a hero.”

Panacea actually looked up, meeting her eyes, letting the frown marring her lips deepen, “What-”

Shepard interrupted, voice suddenly sharp, “It doesn’t matter. I was a hero to most, enemy to others. It doesn’t matter, not really.”

Panacea’s face twisted, like Shepard had just taken a shot with the Widow at something important to her. Not family level important but more like Shepard had just shattered a beloved family aquarium with errant target practice. Shepard knew that look from experience.

“Look,” She said, “Being a hero isn’t all people say it is. There’s a constant pressure, everyone always expecting you to do the right thing. If you mess up and stumble, people don’t expect to need to help you up. The spotlight is a hard place to be.”

Panacea’s face stayed twisted, almost rictus-like for an instant. Her eyes met Shepard’s for a moment. Tired brown eyes into a fatigued green that bore the weight of tens of millions of dead souls.

Panacea dropped her gaze. A muscle tic in her jaw spasmed as she grit her teeth, chewing something over. Her expression almost shifted over toward dismissal but something in Shepard’s eyes seemed to stop her.

“You would know?” Panacea’s tone was caustic.

“I would,” Shepard replied softly. The words sounded ominous, even in the sterile light of the room, growing and echoing, larger than they had any right to be.

She did know after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I've been meaning to write a Mass Effect story for some time.


End file.
